No of course. My joke is that the “the founders never could have imagined” bit really doesn’t stop at the supplication of Congress. They couldn’t imagine mass society. No one in the modern world would design a constitution the same way, because that’s not how the world works anymore.
On that, for sure, 100%
I agree with all of this and just want to add that they all died before toilet paper was a thing
Well... For them, perhaps. The Chinese had been using toilet paper from the 6th century on... (I know... There's always that one guy, and this time it's me. Sorry!)
I’m glad Doug is in this thread because I was going to make a joke about them not imagining toothpaste but then other people said smart things about federalism
They might recognize stuff like toothpaste, but couldn’t imagine what a fluoride ion was.
I heard Alito didn’t wipe his bum bc TP wasn’t originalist enough
One day the internet is going to learn that George Washington’s teeth were not wooden and people are going to lose their minds
Wait till they hear he wasn’t the first President
Also he did at some points tell a lie
Yeah, about those teeth.
I’ve had people refuse to believe me about the teeth so many times so I’ll let someone else rebreak the news
When I was in sixth grade, I learned that they were made from hippopotamus ivory. I was a lot older when I learned the whole story.
Describing it as a purchase certainly counts as a lie
I introduce this fact to my students with The Oatmeal's Believe (clean version) comic. A helpful side benefit is they also learn about the backfire effect. And they seldom forget either after that.
His teeth are my favorite way to shock people at parties.
The Mt. Vernon website adds: "It is important to note that while Washington paid these enslaved people for their teeth it does not mean they had a real option to refuse his request."
For now it does anyway
eating (with) the other as bell hooks might say
But he did cut down huge swaths of trees along with his blue ox! ...or is that something else ...
The slaves teeth?
And plus they just didn't know about a bunch of institutional design options we now have hundreds of country-years of experience with
Sort of darkly funny that every time other countries build constitutions from time to time, international scholars are consulted on ways to do it well even if it is always drafted and executed locally, and, uh, the US consults are like "not all of these ideas are winners, maybe avoid the landmines"
Americans literally wrote the post-war constitution of Japan and it's nothing like ours!
Interesting
We had our chance to constitutional eliminate left-hand driving and we blew it!
😂
This is my most charitable and reasonable version as well
We can really “rizz” up our institutions now, as the kids say
They invented presidentialism by accident, were basically forced to invent federalism, didn't realize they were creating a system necessitating something like judicial review, their version of the electoral college failed the second time it handled a contested election I mean, the list goes on
I think the framers were less surprised by judicial review emerging than we back-fill from our modern lens onto the original lens, but part of that is that what people now call is originalism is, well, a fairly modern judicial invention. But judicial review predates the revolution
Judicial review covers quite a few practices, and these days gets carelessly assimilated to judicial supremacy. The kind we have now isn't what anyone had in mind back then, and couldn't have, since you needed a tradition of written constitutionalism which Britain famously lacks
These were mostly smart guys, but they were stumbling around in the dark
It really was constitutional democracy version 1.0 and they honestly thought we would freaking fix it as we discovered problems
We did fix things until the things that needed fixing were less in the trim and more in the foundation
Wasn't it Jefferson who anticipated we should be on our 4th or 5th constitution by now at a minimum?
Thing is, we *are* on our 4th or 5th constitution if you understand constitutions correctly, as the totality of major rules structuring politics: bsky.app/profile/kjep...
Yeah, @hurricanexyz.bsky.social puts it in terms of we are in the 4th Republic I think rather than 4th constitution but he might correct me here
I'm unusual in that I think the current number is exactly two
Causing fights in the political science and law departments by saying the US Constitution is functionally amended often and irregularly because of Article V making it impossible to be actually amended regularly and infrequently
We don't talk about it this way enough, but the Civil War meant the Constitution failed, full stop. Preventing civil war is the most basic task of any political arrangement, and it didn't prevent it.
I'm not sure if that's more constitutional failure or flat societal "we want evil shit" failure, because no constitution can stop a mass social movement that simply denied human rights exist and no Republic can tolerate that movement on a large scale.
"We become all one thing or all the other" basically
Trump's only a thing in our politics because of the Electoral College, never forget that
...when I explained to my wife what Marbury v Madison did, she asked: why did they have to figure that out though, it seems like a predictable problem that could have been covered in the original document
This is basically it, and it is worth appreciating how much of a quantum leap they still made. The Madisonian frame of analysis is still basically correct, it asks the right questions, they just couldn't have known then all the answers we now do.
The thing I've been thinking about lately is the way that parliamentarism & multi-party politics concentrate power in legislatures, but then fracture it in ways structurally checked by mass electorates. Vastly superior to unreliable branch-based checks & balances which are subverted by parties
Yeah. I wouldn't go full Westminster as my ideal preference, but it is better about that.
Westminster ain't multiparty!
Well, it is relative to our system, it's just a single party usually wins a majority of seats. But they have more than two winning seats and substantial electoral competition beyond just Conservative/Labour. But I meant more on the legislative/executive structural side, not electoral system.
We'd still say New Zealand operates on a Westminster system even though they made it proportional representation and ditched FPTP. I think that's kind of orthogonal to it. Consequential, but not part of what makes a system "Westminster" as opposed to necessarily identical to what the UK still does.
Cooperative vs competitive veto points is the comparative poli sci version of what you’re saying and: I agree!
Without a robust understanding of mature mass parties, that whole paradigm of control & dividing power was unavailable